CO2-LOCATE: A NATIONAL OIL & GAS WELLBORE DATABASE AND VISUALIZATION TOOL TO SUPPORT GEOLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT

Successful, safe, and permanent geologic carbon storage (CS) requires an understanding of local wellbore infrastructure. Information and data on existing wells offer critical insights to inform and assist CS commercial and regulatory communities. These insights can help identify reuse opportunities and identify potential leakage risk. Yet publicly available wellbore data are frequently siloed across regulators. Addressing this challenge, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has published an integrated national wellbore database, CO2-Locate for public access on the Energy Data eXchange® (EDX). CO2-Locate also offers spatial summaries on wellbore trends derived from proprietary resources (e.g., well density counts of wells by status, age, and depths) and spatial layers representing facilities, pipelines, storage areas, and more from NETL’s Global Oil and Gas Infrastructure (GOGI) Database.

Underpinning the CO2-Locate is an intensive attribute-mapping schema and integration methodology, resulting in a geospatial public wells dataset containing over 3.5 million wellbore records with original resource attribute information and uniformed units of measure. NETL is also developing a CO2-Locate web mapping application to support enhanced visualization and data exploration opportunities. The growing CO2-Locate database and online visualization application support and streamline carbon capture and storage (CCS) stakeholder needs, informing site selection and risk assessment through one, integrated, uniform, and up-to-date resource.